Sunday, October 28, 2007



I have no specific purpose in blogging today, save the fact that I haven't posted in such a long time.

So what should I say? Should I reiterate what a crazy adventure school has been, and still is (I have this one professor who asked me, when I gifted him a cup of coffee that someone had gifted to me, "would Seinfeld drink that?" I still don't know a) what he meant by it, and b) what my response would be.)?

Should I talk about the greater adventure of fatherhood, and how much I love my daughter despite the fact that I'll never get a full night's sleep ever again (no way, because she's such a cute and patient baby, and she cries and fusses so little, that I truly could not expect a better child.)?

How about something halloween themed? I love Halloween. I think I get it from my mother. I, like my sister, think that my mom should win some kind of Lifetime Achievement award for her Halloween costumes, including this one that actually made my sister cry: it's a costume she called the Read Death, after the character in the famed literary work, Mask of the Read Death. She put on a long, black wig, painted her face ghostly white with seriously chilling red lines all around her eyes, and sewed a long, red cape; but here's the kicker - she rented a pair of plasterer's stilts, and spent days learning how to walk around on them in costume, so that she became this near 7-foot tall horror to behold. I'm telling you, it's disturbing to be that scared of your own mother. She went to serious lengths to scare the poop out of her high school students, none of whom ever recognized her on Halloween.

There's a story about a film-maker going to the ultimate lengths to make his film believable. For those of you who are squeamish, I'd stop reading here. So there's this film called something like Cannibal Apocalypse. I think it's Italian. Anyway, the premise of the film is that a film crew, while doing a documentary on a tribe of cannibals, goes missing. So the producer journeys down to jolly ol' Africa, or wherever, and bargains with the tribe for the film cannisters. The rest of the film is him watching the film reel watching what happened to these guys. Apparently it's pretty grim. But the genius of the film-maker (the real one) was this: when filming finished, he actually made the actors who die in the film sign a contract saying that they wouldn't appear in public for a year. He even bought them plane tickets to New York and saw them off at the airport. Well, a few months after the film was released the guy got sent to court and tried for murder because everyone was convinced that the thing was real. And so, he had to fly in the actors and have them appear, finally, so that he wouldn't get sent to jail. Epilogue - there apparently are a number of shots in the film that still remain a mystery to film-makers everywhere: no one to this day can figure out how this guy faked it, and there are many, many people who still believe that the film is real, and that the actors that appeared in court were clever lookalikes. Is it real? Who knows! Mw-ha haaaa!

End Transmission.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

On of my favorite mom/Halloween stories, is that she was actually a clown once: something cute. So very incredibly adorably cute. She of course lived up the part for the day, and then never ever was anything except horrible & scary things forever after. She just loved having that one day of the year to stop being so dang nice, and just be scary. Maybe if she were teaching school she would still dress up. I think secretly she wants to. Know it.
MRL

8:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

P.S. Where are you and what are you eating in this picture?
MRL

8:51 AM  

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